3 Top Ways You can Tell if Your Team is Working Well

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3 Top Ways You can Tell if Your Team is Working Well

3 Top Ways you can Tell your Team is Working Well

Lively – sometimes even contentious! – discussions about the requirements and the stakeholders

Spontaneous peer reviews

More conversations

Number 1 seems to invite revolution – it doesn’t. When teams are coming together in true collaborative spirit to get very clear definitions of work required and the circumstances surrounding it, you will hear it. Sometimes it’s pretty loud.

And that’s a good thing.

Because questions and answers on topics that matter to the questioners and answerers can get loud. That’s great – as long as loud doesn’t signal antagonism or bad behavior. A spirited conversation that teases out what they really meant is a good way for team members to learn constructive communication habits. Asking, and getting answers, and finding that it’s quite safe to do so can result in greater creativity and more innovative thinking. Remember the last time you shared an idea with a trusted colleague? Did you ever have the experience when the very act of sharing the idea prompted your mind to tweak it, shift it or change it?

Spontaneous peer reviews indicates that the requirements are clear and technologists and the other professionals on the team are willing to work together to achieve them. It means that the focus has shifted to rigorous quality and away from ‘keep your head down and off the radar’.

More conversations will sometimes start as simply more noise – don’t let that fool you. As your team builds the levels of internal trust you will find that they, like so many others, will begin to develop team-speak. Team-speak is a kind of short-hand that relies on the ability to trust each other. Combine that with a focus on both clear definition of the subject at hand, and always keeping the customer in mind as the deliverables are crafted, and you’ll have a powerful team dynamic that delivers quickly, well, and with less overall stress.

Which one of these are you seeing in your environment – in your teams?

Encourage open discussion and reward the candid questions that seek to clarify.

Introduce peer review practices on small pieces of work at first. This gives the team members a chance to experience it, see the impact it makes to improve the work product, and grow the productivity level of the team.